by E. M. Foner
“Alright, here’s what I can do for you,” she tried to sound as reluctant as possible, while pretending to be in silent conversation with her non-existent superiors. “Send my consulate the contact information for your disintegrator supplier, and my people will negotiate a penalty for cancelling the order. If the supplier insists on delivery, we’ll take two projectors, but you’ll have to take the other two. Do we have a deal?”
Branch looked relieved and extended his hand, fingers up, like he was pushing on an invisible wall. “Deal,” he said, and after a brief moment of confusion, Kelly extended her hand to meet his, noticing for the first time that he was missing his little finger, apparently by design.
“Well that was an interesting half hour,” Branch continued, reverting to his earlier form. “Are you ready to join me for a little celebration now?”
“I never mix business with pleasure,” Kelly replied, attempting to sound regretful for the sake of the Drazen’s ego. Branch made a show of searching his clothing for something and then claimed to have forgotten his money pouch on the ship. Kelly just smiled and shooed him away, relieved to have solved the Belugian contract emergency for the cost of a couple drinks. She was sure he’d find his money easily enough when he caught up with his crew.
Three
When Joe McAllister heard that the disintegrator sale was off the table, he breathed a deep sigh of relief. He’d been sweating over how to get the antique weapons hot for a demo, but he couldn’t draw sufficient power from station distribution, probably a good thing for the structural integrity of the hold.
Joe had even considered offering the weapons to the buyer for scrap weight, just to free up precious space in Mac’s Bones, the junkyard he’d won in a card game three years earlier while waiting for a new deployment. It had been a struggle ever since to pay rent on the hold stuffed full of random alien spacefaring artifacts, the nameplates of which could have served as the galaxy’s Rosetta Stone for “No user serviceable parts.”
That morning, an EarthCent apparatchik had contacted Mac’s Bones out of the blue and offered to pay a cancellation fee on the disintegrator deal. After some minor blustering in an attempt to get the price up, he’d settled for twenty-five hundred Stryx creds, which would pay the rent for another cycle. So Joe was in a good mood as he showered and dressed for his first introduction through the Eemas service.
After years of being inundated with Eemas ads through every form of station media, he had to admit he was curious to find out if the service was as good as its frightening reputation. Frightening for a forty-year-old bachelor. Thanks to a barter deal for a salvaged Alterian fuel pack with less than a quarter of its power remaining, Joe was the proud owner of a second-hand Eemas subscription with just one date used.
The original owner had been so desperate to fire up his little scout ship and get off the station that he threw in his silver suit of clothes to sweeten the deal. Unfortunately, the guy had sported a lower center of gravity than Joe’s rangy frame, so the sleeves were a bit short and the cut was somewhat baggy. But Union Station fashions were eclectic, to say the least, and Joe believed that even his grandfather’s beekeeper gear would have gone unremarked at a party.
Paul tilted up his chin and squinted against the reflections coming off the suit when Joe finished dressing, but he didn’t say anything, which was normal for the thirteen year old. Paul had been a sort of mascot for Joe’s squad since the age of eight, when they had pulled the starving boy from the wreckage of a smelter on a mining colony that had been raided and destroyed. The raiders were long gone and the constant sandstorms had already buried any bodies left on the surface by the time Joe’s crew arrived, so they never found out if Paul’s parents were dead or taken captive.
When Joe won Mac’s Bones, he decided to leave the mercenaries and try running the business himself, partly to give Paul a home where the kid could meet some other children. That and the fact that as Joe aged, the mercenary retirement plan of dying with your boots on had been sounding less and less attractive.
“You go to bed, I may be back late,” he told Paul, before exiting their spacious if crude quarters in the crew module of a scrapped ice harvester which had lost a fight with a comet’s tail. The remains of the vessel sat in an improvised cradle near the entrance of the hold that contained Mac’s Bones. As part of the inner docking and warehousing deck, the space featured the highest ceilings on the station, but the floor curvature was more noticeable than on the outer decks.
Some show-off civilizations employed artificial black holes at the center of spherical space stations to create gravitational pull, but they were a technical nightmare to build and maintain, and ridiculously expensive in fuel for arriving and departing ships. The space stations built by the Stryx were all versions of an enormous, slowly spinning cylinder, with a vast hollow core to accommodate shipping traffic and hundreds of concentric decks to satisfy the gravitational preferences of biological tenants.
The atmospheric plugs in Joe’s nose hummed happily, as if they enjoyed the challenge of filtering breathable air out of the witch’s brew of gases that filled the shared areas of the station, such as the tube lift from the docking deck to the residential areas. Many of the humans who frequented mixed sections of the station wore the plugs in a little locket around their necks so that they were always available when needed.
It took tourists a while to get accustomed to the plugs, and humans had to remember not to breathe through their mouths, but versions of the same technology allowed many species to mingle in shared areas of the space station. The simple plugs worked in sections where the atmosphere contained enough oxygen and nitrogen for them to filter, but if the ratio of the gases was too far off, they would start to overheat, a phenomenon known as “nose burn.”
After less than a minute in transit, the capsule finished its run and came to a halt at Joe’s destination on the upscale human recreational and residential deck. He emerged and took a few cautious steps to adjust to the minor increase in gravity, feeling all the while like a tourist in his flashy suit.
The Eemas date was scheduled for 20:30 hours in Chinatown, which meant he had some time to kill if he was going to arrive fashionably late. No points scored by looking needy, he told himself. Instead, he strolled in the opposite direction towards the Little Apple, a sort of melting pot of Earth cultures, though few of the activities that took place in the Little Apple could be described as cultural events.
Joe ducked reflexively at the sound of popping champagne corks as he strode past the Elvis chapel, where a lucky couple of somethings with two legs and one head each had just tied the knot. Champagne corks popping reminded him of the sound of the goo throwers his men had come up against in the Bereftian action. The goo stuck to armor and deployed an army of nanobots, turning the casualty into—ugh, he’d rather not think about it.
“Flowers for your lady, sir?” piped up a small girl, tugging at his suit sleeve. She was ten or twelve, with a basket of what appeared to be fresh-cut roses on her arm. The girl was small for her age, and somebody had applied fake smudges of grime to her face, as if there was some secret slum where the station’s maintenance bots would allow dirt to accumulate. It came to him that he’d never been accosted by a flower girl before, which he took as a vote of confidence in the silver suit.
“Uh, I can take one, I guess,” Joe replied awkwardly. Although he’d been conducting a largely one-sided conversation with Paul for five years, Joe wasn’t very good talking with children, especially little girls.
“The ladies usually expect a dozen,” the girl pushed her pitch with wide-eyed sincerity. “It’s 5 centees for one or 20 for a dozen, so it’s almost like I’m robbing you if you don’t take twelve.”
“Oh, alright then, a dozen,” he agreed, making a mental note to cross to the other side of the pedestrian corridor the next time he saw a flower girl waiting. She expertly counted out a dozen roses and wrapped a bit of sticky foil around the stems to keep them together. Joe dug t
hrough his pockets and extracted a 25-centee piece for the girl.
Small trade in the station economy was carried out with Stryx creds and a few other hard currencies from the local empires, bypassing the tyranny of electronic money. Only for the largest transactions did anybody resort to financial intermediaries, and the more trustworthy species managed to avoid banks completely through a combination of barter and promissory notes.
“Here you are, sir, mind the thorns,” the girl cautioned as she handed him the roses and took the coin. “Will you be needing change, sir?”
“Uh, I guess not,” Joe mumbled and quickly moved away from the petite mugger. Maybe electronic money had some advantages after all, but most of the galaxy’s denizens preferred hard cash for privacy reasons. Earth was the only planet he knew where people paid for items with their bulky communication devices, something that had slowed the adoption of the subvoc and translation implants that were otherwise omnipresent throughout civilized space. But he hadn’t been back to Earth in the twenty years since his parents were killed in a car accident and he shipped out as a mercenary, so maybe things had changed.
The aroma from varied ingredients sizzling in hot woks filled the air as Joe reached Chinatown and headed to the Great Panda Pagoda, where the date was scheduled. He was looking for a woman with very long black hair and black fingernails with gold stripes. Since he hadn’t gotten around to checking with Eemas about the process for resetting the subscription, Joe was curious to see what kind of woman the service had picked out for the former owner of the suit.
Wading through the tightly packed tables, Joe focused on the gold striped black fingernails angle, as many of the female patrons favored long black hair. Finally he spotted a tall, imperious looking woman with an elaborate ponytail as long as his arm and a sleeveless top made out of gold metallic mesh that extended right up her neck to the underside of her jaw. She was standing in the entrance of a private cubby off to one side of the service counter, and after making eye contact, she entered it without waiting for him to approach. For some odd reason, his brief glimpse of the gold stripes on her long black fingernails reminded him of the warning coloration sported by some poisonous creatures on Earth.
“Hi, I’m Joe,” he said and mustered his best smile as he entered the private cubby. “Sorry if I’m a bit late, got held up in the Little Apple.”
His date fixed him with a cold glare as he pulled out a chair and sat down across from her at the tiny round table. This wasn’t going well at all. “Oh, here, I brought you these,” he added, extending the bouquet as a peace offering.
“How sweet of you,” she purred, taking the flowers. “I am the Lady Talia.” As soon as she found her grip on the foil wrapped around the stems, she leaned across the table and lightly slapped him across the face with the blooms. The rose petals mainly held together, though he got one stuck in his teeth, which might teach him not to open his mouth in surprise.
“What the hell!” Joe exploded.
“I don’t like it when a man isn’t on time, Joe,” she answered, pronouncing his name with undisguised disdain, as if it didn’t come up to her standard of sophistication.
“I said I was sorry. I hope you don’t let this spoil the evening,” he replied after a short staring contest, during which he didn’t like what he saw. “Why don’t we order something? I know I’d feel better with some food in my stomach.”
“I ordered for us already, Joe. I’m sure that was your intention in any case,” she added with a cold little chuckle.
“Am I missing something here?” Joe asked, not sure if he was more annoyed with Lady Talia, the Eemas service, or the former owner of the subscription who he was beginning to realize may have had some quirks.
“Let’s get right to the point, Joe. You tell me why I should accept a badly dressed man who doesn’t arrive on time into my harem,” she replied, tapping the long black nails of her free hand on the tabletop. “I’m waiting.”
“Look, you’ve got this all wrong,” Joe protested. “You see, I got this suit and the dating subscription in a trade with a guy for a fuel pack, and I didn’t get around to informing Eemas of the change.” Then he laughed and broke into the wide, open smile that had cracked the defenses of more than one woman in the old days. “It’s kind of funny when you think about it. I mean, we’ll both have a good story.”
“Joe, Joe, Joe,” she drawled slowly, as if she was trying to provoke him. “You don’t expect me to believe that hogwash. I could see from the moment you entered the restaurant that you crave a strong hand on the reins. I could see it in the way you crossed the floor, and how you squirm about on your seat like you’re afraid somebody will touch you. And I will touch you, Joe, but only when I choose to do so.”
“Now, just set that shuttle down, lady, I mean, Lady Talia. I don’t like sitting with my back to a roomful of people, that’s just common sense, and I can order my own damn food if it’s all the same to you.”
“You’re fighting me, Joe,” she reprimanded him, but the corners of her mouth turned up and her eyes began to sparkle. “I like a man who knows how to play this game.”
Joe stood up and shoved his chair back from the table. “I’m getting the hell out of here, lady. I’m sorry I screwed up your evening. Better luck next time.” He pulled aside the curtain and walked out of the booth.
“Joe,” she called after him mockingly. “Eemas knows you better than you know yourself. You’ll never find happiness unless you accept that.”
He flipped a hand at her dismissively without turning around as he worked his way through the clustered tables towards the exit.
“Joe!” He could hear her laughter as the restaurant fell quiet in enjoyment of the free entertainment. “You’ll be back.”
It’s not just me who won’t be back, he mused, as he headed towards the Little Apple for a burger. Now I know why the former owner of this suit was in such a hurry to get off the station. I’ve got to contact Eemas tomorrow and find out about updating that subscription.
But as he sat watching the people strolling by the Burger Bar, nursing his beer and wiping up stray smears of ketchup with the few remaining fries, he found himself wondering what kind of woman the omniscient Eemas would spring on him for real. All of a sudden, it was kind of scary, just like the ads.
Four
“Congratulations, Kelly.” Stanley welcomed her with a hearty handshake as he let her into the condo he shared with Donna and their girls. “From acting consul to full consul in two years. That must be some kind of record.”
Kelly couldn’t figure out if this was intended as a compliment or a consolation since she didn’t know how long it usually took to make full consul, but she knew Stanley meant well in either case.
“Thank you, Stan.” Kelly dipped her head in acknowledgement and followed him into the kitchen, where Donna was working on some complicated dessert.
The ambient apartment lighting was much brighter than the hall outside, about as bright as early afternoon on Earth, so she assumed the girls had talked their parents into a modified schedule. Blythe and Chastity were engaged in artistically smearing something that looked like burnt molasses onto each other’s faces, which struck Kelly as a little immature for girls their age.
“Grab a seat, Kelly, I’ll just be another minute. If I don’t mix in the Thorian spice-starch at the precise temperature and time, the tarts could burst into flames,” Donna explained, then paused to think. “Or maybe they’ll turn green, which would be even worse.”
“No hurry. I’ve got a half hour before my date,” Kelly replied. “So what are my silly girls up to?”
“We’re not silly!” the girls replied in chorus, followed by gales of laughter and the impromptu chant, “You’ll never guess, you’ll never guess.”
“Are you fighting?” Kelly asked, always a good first guess when engaged in a game of twenty questions with children on the station.
“No,” the girls squealed, wiping their hands on dresses that looked
like something from a history book, which drew Kelly’s attention to the fact that they weren’t wearing their typical one-piece jumpsuits.
“What’s going on?” Kelly directed her question to Donna since Stan had already retreated to his sports room. Despite his expertise as a knowledge trader for a gaming guild, Stan was always the softest touch for family information since he was oblivious to the value of secrets that didn’t advance game play.
“Have you seen the immersive release of My Fair Lady yet?” Donna answered her question with a question, a habit that drove Kelly nuts at work almost every day. Guessing games and making up stories were extremely popular with the children on the station, much more so than she remembered from her own youth. The problem was that it seemed to rub off on their parents, so Kelly found it difficult to get a straight answer from anybody who had kids at home.
“You know I avoid the immersives,” she replied. “Smelling and tasting things that aren’t there, feeling weather that isn’t real, giving the projectors direct access to my implants. The whole thing is too creepy, and it just makes me dizzy.”
“Poor Aunty Kelly,” said Blythe, and the twelve year old shook her head in mock despair. “I guess you’re never going find out our secret.”
“I think I remember the story,” Kelly said hopefully. “A lower class woman learns how to speak nicely in exchange for chocolate. Right?”
Donna slid the tray of tarts into the oven and told it “Thorian spice tarts.” The oven thought it over for a microsecond before loading the proper program and displaying a countdown to completion.
